Way back in the early days of gaming, you could make a nice bit of money with a trading simulation. M.U.L.E. was one of the first great games. Then you had all those space trading games like Elite and the indie classic Gazillionaire. Each took the basic buy low/sell high dynamic and added something to it to distract from the underlying idea that you were making money by doing the same thing over and over again. The form has fallen by the wayside in the last few years, so it’s a little surprising to see Space Trader return to this well trod path.

The formula is familiar: Travel the universe trading goods for profit and complete missions for the sundry characters that populate the universe. You get your usual “make X thousands dollars before sundown” and “take this package to so and so”, and when you complete a chapter you are given more room to roam. More planets, more goods, more missions. Then you keep doing this.

The developer understands that you might get bored doing this, so it mixes things up with shooter missions. Every now and then one of your bosses will ask you to eliminate the competition with a gun or you will get the chance to track down a criminal for a small bounty. You are transported to a shooting environment dating from the original Doom. There are rotating shield upgrades, medkits, and weapons littering the floor. So if you are tired playing an average trading game, you always have the option to play a subpar shooter.

The trading is made more interesting through random events. If a famine hits earth, for example, you have a small window of opportunity in which to make a killing selling food. Profiting from the misfortune of others is the theme here – other frequent events are crime waves and plagues. Since each mission is timed, you have to balance the hours you spend making a lot of money with how much time you have left to meet the demands of your employers. The travel time between planets can vary widely from one turn to the next, however, which makes long term planning very difficult. There is also rarely any need to carry more than any single item in your cargo hold; there is always more than enough to fill your stores so if Mars needs weapons you just load up with weapons and walk away with a few hundred thousand bucks.

The cumulative effect of this system is to diminish any sense of business strategy. It will take no particular financial acumen to gather a lot of money, though the time constraints can be a little painful, especially if you fail a shooting mission repeatedly – you get multiple chances to kill your target, nicely removing what little sense of verisimilitude the game has to begin with. You aren’t given any clue as to how many missions are left to do or when your boss will ask you to do them. Popping home to learn that you need to raise 20 million dollars in the next 50 hours is enough to make a man scream. I assume I have a phone on my spaceship, right? Can’t they call me?